Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro review: You say you want resolution

The Yoga 2 Pro has a knack for bending and folding. The first thing you’ll notice about Lenovo’s latest Windows 8 tab-top is its 360-degree hinge, which enables a range of poses. Keep pushing the multi-touch monitor, and it will turn from a keyboard-and-touchpad laptop (stretch) to an upright, counter-sitting tablet (streeetch) to a completely flat tablet (streeeeeeetch, ooh).

That’s not just a reason to make jokes about “downward facing dog" (like the last model); this form-shifting functionality proves so useful, it now seems like a “duh” move for any multi-touch, keyboard-optional laptop. As such, Lenovo has gone to lengths to make sure the second iteration of the Yoga Pro line brings more to the portable party.

Most notably, the new Yoga has more pixels. The device now comes with a staggering 3200×1800 of those pixels, packed into the same 13.3-inch screen as the original model. Coupled with a slight reduction in chunkiness and a bump in specs, this could set this device up as the ultimate drool-inducing portable in the $1,000 range.

After extensive testing, the Yoga 2 Pro’s size and screen certainly earn it that river of drool. However, in spite of its best qualities (did we mention all of those pixels?), the biggest drawback is the operating system they're tied to.

How to hold it, how to fold it

The Yoga 2 Pro's chassis doesn’t stray far from the last model for better and for worse. It has the same rubberized texture on the inside and out, which feels weird at first touch but proves quite comfortable for lengthy typing stretches. The original Yoga's chiclet keyboard has also seen no changes and fits my large hands pretty well; it lacks anything in the way of distracting design or key placement, and even better, the keys now come backlit.

The trackpad is seemingly unchanged, meaning its sensitivity and usefulness are a little funky. Unfortunately, it didn’t take much time for the trackpad to noticeably darken where our fingers pressed it the most.

Weight has gone down from 3.4 to 3.1 lbs, and our tape measure confirms a thickness of 0.61” on both ends (meaning the tapering cut in material on the front end is mostly illusion). The sides show a minor port shuffling, the only major differences being the HDMI-out port shrinking to mini and the addition of an odd, fingernail-sized button that brings up a system backup menu. Again, Lenovo has elected to include only one USB 3.0 port and to place a USB 2.0 port on the opposite side (seemingly to toy with Ars’ poor Andrew Cunningham, who wants every USB 2.0 port to be replaced as soon as humanly possible, thank you).

The all-important hinge returns, continuing to straddle the fine line between firmness and bendability. It stays mighty still when the Yoga 2 Pro is in “stand” mode, in which the keyboard side lays flat on a table while the touchscreen faces the user, as well as in “tent” mode, in which the screen and keyboard sides form a tent at a roughly 30 degree angle.

Both of these “poses” benefit from rubberized coating on the edges, which plant the device and reduce its wobble. The laptop arrangement results in a teensy bit of wobble, as the screen doesn’t completely lock into place at any upright angle, but you’ll really have to look to notice it.

Enlarge/ Just like the last model, the screen is a beaut, even from very wide angles.

The tent and stand modes prove great ways to showcase this high-res, 16:9 screen, especially since the modes nix the eight inches of distance that would otherwise be occupied by the keyboard. I’ve quite enjoyed laying in bed with the Yoga 2 Pro propped up in stand mode on my chest so that I could comfortably watch “Super HD” content on Netflix within a few inches of my face. Emphasis on “comfortably.” I've engaged in plenty of acrobatics to make wonky tablet cases hold a screen up anywhere near as elegantly as this unit, and it'll be hard to look back after watching late-night TV this way.

For portability’s sake, there’s no Blu-ray drive, so users will probably rely on streaming and downloaded video. While that content usually maxes out at 1080p, the Yoga 2 Pro does a solid enough job rendering and upsampling that resolution’s content without any glaring visual issues. As of right now, this is the best mix of resolution and screen size on the market to deliver eye-popping portable video quality, especially since the 16:9 ratio means less screen space wasted on black bars. Other videos, particularly those from Hulu Plus, don’t look quite as sexy. There’s only so much upsampling can do to convert from 720p (or less) to 1800p.

You can even enjoy remarkably high-res video content when you split the Yoga 2 Pro’s screen into multiple apps, all without taxing the laptop’s specs too much. Our review unit, currently priced at $999, came packed with a dual-core i5-4200U CPU clocked at 1.6 Ghz, along with 4GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD, and an embedded Intel HD 4400 graphics chip. We've already run some performance benchmarks on this particular chip in our review of Acer's Aspire S7 Ultrabook, and we point you to that in order to see how it stacks up to other comparable CPUs.

Shoppers can add $200 to the MSRP to jump to an i7 CPU and a 256GB SSD. You’ll have to upgrade the RAM yourself by popping the keyboard open, which like last model, will only allow you to replace the default offering with a single 8GB stick.Update: According to several readers and Lenovo's own support site, the Yoga 2 Pro's RAM is soldered to the motherboard. You'll have to buy the system with as much RAM as you need, since aftermarket upgrades won't be possible.

We would love more RAM (that’s our bumper sticker, by the way), but pretty much every productivity app we loaded worked without a hitch or an incredible slowdown. While the system’s fans produce an audible hum, it was certainly meek and never proved noticeable while watching movies or TV.

This is no gaming system by any stretch, but knowing that even a Microsoft Surface Pro can handle a touch-friendly version of Civilization V, we tried booting it up. There were immediate errors. For one, the game would never boot into “full-screen” resolution unless we told the game to render 3200×1800, a move that resulted in an immediate crash. For another, even trying to open the game took 20 minutes of trial-and-error, thanks to Windows being unable to figure out how to register our clicks through the initial “click here to continue” prompt, both with mouse and with touch.

Enlarge/ The touchscreen's Windows button is no longer a protruding button, and as such, it sometimes takes an extra tap or two to register.

Did you test with Windows 8.1 or Windows 8? Your first paragraph is unclear regarding this important point. Lenovo is currently shipping the Yoga 2 Pro with Windows 8.1. If your test system came with plain 8, you really should have tried updating it to 8.1. If you were using 8.1, that would be good to know you're continuing to have issues. (Typing on a HiDPI desktop on 8.1 myself... things are definitely interesting with two regularish resolution monitors plus a QHD.)

Edit: It was the first paragraph of the second page that had me puzzled:

Quote:

Really, almost every headache we encountered in our Yoga 2 Pro testing came from how Windows 8 handled such a high resolution. As 8.1 sees a wider-scale rollout to users in the near future, the OS may become better optimized for a 276 PPI future, but as of press time, it’s not up to snuff.

The box back on the first page and a Andrew Cunningham's reply made it clear that they were using 8.1.

The problems with the HiDPI display were chief among factors that made me choose a Thinkpad Yoga over the Y2Pro. I love small laptops, and the 1080P looks fantastic on the 12.5" screen, and it doesn't suffer from the scaling issues that the higher res brings with it.

Wrong GPU for driving a high-res screen. It should have a GT3 part like the HD 5000 as a minimum. Why is it only Apple who are pushing Intel HD 5000/5100/5200 GPUs in their devices? Almost every other laptop is stuck on 4400/4600 due to manufacturers cheaping out.

Wrong GPU for driving a high-res screen. It should have a GT3 part like the HD 5000 as a minimum. Why is it only Apple who are pushing Intel HD 5000/5100/5200 GPUs in their devices? Almost every other laptop is stuck on 4400/4600 due to manufacturers cheaping out.

Are there any Wintel machines at all with the HD5000? The Macbook Pro is the only machine I've ever seen it advertised on.

Did you test with Windows 8.1 or Windows 8? Your first paragraph is unclear regarding this important point. Lenovo is currently shipping the Yoga 2 Pro with Windows 8.1. If your test system came with plain 8, you really should have tried updating it to 8.1. If you were using 8.1, that would be good to know you're continuing to have issues. (Typing on a HiDPI desktop on 8.1 myself... things are definitely interesting with two regularish resolution monitors plus a QHD.)

Wrong GPU for driving a high-res screen. It should have a GT3 part like the HD 5000 as a minimum. Why is it only Apple who are pushing Intel HD 5000/5100/5200 GPUs in their devices? Almost every other laptop is stuck on 4400/4600 due to manufacturers cheaping out.

Are there any Wintel machines at all with the HD5000? The Macbook Pro is the only machine I've ever seen it advertised on.

Wrong GPU for driving a high-res screen. It should have a GT3 part like the HD 5000 as a minimum. Why is it only Apple who are pushing Intel HD 5000/5100/5200 GPUs in their devices? Almost every other laptop is stuck on 4400/4600 due to manufacturers cheaping out.

Are there any Wintel machines at all with the HD5000? The Macbook Pro is the only machine I've ever seen it advertised on.

As far as I've seen, the higher-spec Asus Zenbook UX301 with the 2560x1440 has a 5100, but it's a heck of a lot more expensive than the 13 inch MBP and really hard to find in the UK. There's also one by System76 with the 5200 Iris Pro, but it doesn't count as Wintel as it's shipped with Ubuntu. They're a US-only supplier anyway.

our tape measure confirms a thickness of 0.61” on both ends (meaning the tapering cut in material on the front end is mostly illusion).

I'm pretty sure the taper on the edge is to make the device easier to pick up from a flat surface (gives your fingers somewhere to wedge on to). This has been on many Thinkpad models for a long time now.

so this thing effectively has 1600x900 real workspace if the dpi is set to 1:2not ideal. those scaling options have to go lower-level so software can render properly (then again, most won't, because of some graphical elements that aren't vectorial)and here i thought windows 8 fixed the "retina" issues... guess i'll stick to 7 for a while longer

Desktop scaling in Windows can be set to a variety of percentages, including custom percentages, so your "real workspace" as you call it can vary. If your eyes are capable, you can render desktop elements as small as 1:1.

Windows will automatically scale any apps other than those that mark themselves as "high DPI aware" in their manifests. The problem is that many developers, particularly of apps that deal with media, check this though their apps are *not* high-DPI aware, presumably to avoid having to do the real work of fixing their code.

The Windows 8 defense brigade should be along shortly to explain that if Windows 8 wasn't making you poop sunshine then you are clearly doing something wrong.

Win 7 is certainly no better than Win 8 when it comes to above-FHD resolutions. This isn't a place for an 8 v 7 flameear.

I'ts not a 8 vs 7 issue, it's a 'MS's current OS doesn't make the most of available hardware' issue. There are some sweet hiDPI displays out there that are currently pointless because someone is worrying about making billboard apps look pretty instead of focusing on productivity apps.

My sister actually got one of these, and loves it so far. But she also doesn't do any gaming, so there is that. Personally, I feel that in a device of this size I'm fine with 1080P, so my surface pro 1 suits my needs perfectly in that respect.

It's really odd that you have issues with the "latest Internet Explorer" at 3200x1800. I used a Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus at a Microsoft Store without a single problem. Everything within Internet Explorer seemed to render properly with crystal clear sharpness. What exactly did you use with menu problem?

I was excited about this computer until I learned that it has a Pentile display.Pentile just doesn't make any sense to me for an LCD. The panel has a white/clear subpixel. That means that any saturated color will look too dark next to white.You can set it to a mode to compensate for this, but then you end up with less power efficiency than you'd get with an RGB display.

Here's a simulation I made. While the whites are brighter, yellows (or any other saturated color) are darker than a traditional RGB display.

I wish it had the Iris Pro 5200. I really want a nice 4th generation i7 and Iris Pro 5200 in either a mini-PC or laptop for Linux. So far I'm looking at the Gigabyte Brix, new ASUS Zenbook UX301 and the new System76 Galago UltraPro 14.1"

At this sort of resolution it doesn't make since for it to have anything less than the Iris Pro 5200.

The Windows 8 defense brigade should be along shortly to explain that if Windows 8 wasn't making you poop sunshine then you are clearly doing something wrong.

Win 7 is certainly no better than Win 8 when it comes to above-FHD resolutions. This isn't a place for an 8 v 7 flameear.

I'ts not a 8 vs 7 issue, it's a 'MS's current OS doesn't make the most of available hardware' issue. There are some sweet hiDPI displays out there that are currently pointless because someone is worrying about making billboard apps look pretty instead of focusing on productivity apps.

Desktop application developers have to do some work to make use of newer OS features for high-DPI, but the OS certainly supports the hardware. Windows, in fact, is capable of supporting hardware of varying display densities, not just 100% and 200% (as on 'Retina' Macs).

It would be nice if Microsoft could wave a magic wand, but there are valid reasons why Microsoft allows developers to opt-out of system level scaling, and why Windows continues to support older UI frameworks and fonts that are not high-DPI compatible. In Metro, at least, they had a clean slate.

The Windows 8 defense brigade should be along shortly to explain that if Windows 8 wasn't making you poop sunshine then you are clearly doing something wrong.

Win 7 is certainly no better than Win 8 when it comes to above-FHD resolutions. This isn't a place for an 8 v 7 flameear.

I'ts not a 8 vs 7 issue, it's a 'MS's current OS doesn't make the most of available hardware' issue. There are some sweet hiDPI displays out there that are currently pointless because someone is worrying about making billboard apps look pretty instead of focusing on productivity apps.

Desktop application developers have to do some work to make use of newer OS features for high-DPI, but the OS certainly supports the hardware. Windows, in fact, is capable of supporting hardware of varying display densities, not just 100% and 200% (as on 'Retina' Macs).

It would be nice if Microsoft could wave a magic wand, but there are valid reasons why Microsoft allows developers to opt-out of system level scaling, and why Windows continues to support older UI frameworks and fonts that are not high-DPI compatible. In Metro, at least, they had a clean slate.

I get a content not found on that link

I agree, they had a clean slate with Metro, but the decision to allow it to co-exist with the traditional windows desktop just makes a royal mess for everyone. Devs of new products will probably at least try to make things work with Metro, devs of legacy apps say 'why bother, look at the miserable adoption rate', and the rest of us get to bitch about how neither Metro nor the traditional desktop are ideal for us anymore.

I'm always skeptical of reviews that cite horribly inaccurate touchpads. I've been using an HP Folio 13--one of the first ultrabooks available--since December 2011 and it's touchpad is fine once you adjust the Synaptics settings.

Owner here, The memory is soldered on to the board so there is no upgrading later. So buy the one you want to have later now. Only two components are upgradable, the m.2 ssd and m.2 NIC card.

Love the screen and speed of the i7 w/8gb. The ssd is slower at read/write than other m.2 ssd's and no matter what model you get, they all come w/ the paltry 802.11n single band 7260N card. Bluetooth is seriously crippled w/ Intel power mgmt. You can buy a 7260NGW dual band 802.11ac card and double you internet speed (depending on router and internet connection).

Looks like a great device. But windows DPI scaling really hampers it here. They could have offered a 1600x900 mode, but I'm not sure how well this "pixel-quadrupling" would work given its a PenTile display.

Can the author really be so oblivious to those massive bezels above and below the screen? 16:10 was always a superior aspect ratio to 16:9 for general computing use, yet somehow reviewers have been conned into believing that it is beneficial to avoid "black bars" during video. This is despite the fact that as display technology improves with better rendering of blacks you shouldn't be able to distinguish black on the screen from a black bezel (not that it ever bothered me with video on any existing 16:10 screen either).

Hi-dpi/retina continues to be "exciting", depending on your needs. I own a Retina macbook pro, on which I use both OS X and Windows 8.1. The situation is much better than it was under Windows 7 or even 8, although nowhere near as good as it is on the Mac side (where everything is awesome - I have exactly one application which isn't perfect on a retina display, and it's at least useable, which I can't say about some applications in hi-dpi on the windows side).

Visual Studio 2013 is quite good, despite a handful of remaining quirks buried deep. SSMS is ok. My main remaining problem is that IE and Chrome are both miserable on external displays, although they're ok on the main "retina" display. Some of my secondary apps work very poorly, although I'm about 95% in VS/SSMS/Outlook. Support for external, non-retina monitors is vastly improved and yet still uninspiring.

High density is the future, and awesome when everything works, but you really need to know how well your individual applications are supported before making the jump. Once 4k displays become affordable, things will surely improve, I hope.